In the prior art, I described in my patent of the analytic bone implant (hereinafter sometimes call the "ABI"), U.S. Pat. No. 4,936,851 issued Jun. 26, 1990 to Fox et al., a device that allows cancellous bone and marrow as well as organs surrounded by hardened cortical bone to be accessed repeatable from the same site with minimal surgical trauma and morbidity. The purpose of gaining repeated access was to provide a means for obtaining a significant sample of cancellous tissue for histologic and morphometric analysis.
A subsequent invention of mine, the cancellous access port (hereinafter sometimes called the "CAP") bone implants are patent pending (Ser. No. 07/575,001, filed Aug. 29, 1990 by Fox et al.). Like the ABI, the CAP can be used for repeated biopsies of osseous tissue. The CAP is novel when configured with a three electrode transducer for electrochemical characterization of biology/biomaterial interfacial reactions.
Through repeated use of the prior art, failures of the mechanism, difficulty in surgical placement and the inability to acquire a biopsy have been encountered, thus a new invention, the bone biopsy implant, was conceived to remedy these failings.